Filipino distillery Destileria Barako is well-known for its creative use of local ingredients in its award-winning spirits and its amazing factory tours on the beautiful island of Boracay (that end with drinks at a swim-up pool bar). Here, we chat with director Tyson Branz to find out how Destileria began and what the Filipino alcohol landscape is like. Inside Retail: Tell me the story behind the launch of Destileria Barako. Tyson Branz: Before Destileria Barako, our head distiller, Brenda
Brendan, and I invested in a distillery in Australia. We actually won the world’s best spiced rum in 2019 with Capricorn spiced rum. We decided to open the Philippine distillery in 2016 for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, we saw a great opportunity to help raise the profile of local spirits here.
Secondly, the Philippines is abundant in amazing produce, unfortunately a lot of it is undervalued. We hope highlighting some of these products will raise awareness and help farmers start to add value.
We now have two locations. Our main production facility is down near Boracay Island. During the pandemic, we built our second facility in Poblacion Makati in Manila, at our cocktail bar Agimat and Ugat Foraging Bar and Kitchen.
IR: How would you describe the alcoholic beverage landscape in the Philippines at the moment?
TB: Pre pandemic, the food and beverage scene in the Philippines was starting to flourish. It was exciting, with new craft breweries and distilleries starting to pop up. We were able to launch five new SKUs and we picked up several SIP awards, including the Philippines’ first product innovation award for our Ube Cream Liqueur. We hope everyone can survive and continue pushing once everything settles down again.
IR: Tell me about the local ingredients used in your beverages and why it was important to you to use them.
TB: We entered the market here because the Philippines is abundant with great ingredients – amazing tropical fruits that grow all year round. Our Foraging Bar concept has us travelling to new regions of the Philippines and working directly with local farmers. Each of our products highlights unique Filipino ingredients.
Sirena Blue Pea Gin highlights the amazing colour-changing blue pea flower, which we now grow at the distillery. We’ve also provided our local barangay (community) with seeds for it, to create business for them. Sirena Blue Pea Gin also has pink pomelo from Davao. Sirena Dry Gin is the world’s first gin to have vapour-infused rambutans.
Ube Cream Liqueur is another world first. It won a product innovation award in California this year and the response from the market has been amazing. Ube is such a hot flavour right now, we are really excited for that one – for local and export markets.
Agimat Gin is a great example of our work with local farmers. It has two main ingredients from each region of the Philippines, most of these were found only through foraging and two are rare and were going extinct, as they had no commercial value. We’ve now got farmers producing them for us to ensure they continue for years to come.
IR: Why did you decide to launch the distillery tours and what’s involved in them?
TB: Our distillery tours started down in Boracay and became some of the most popular tours on the island. We have some amazing natural beauty in our region. People go river tubing and cliff jumping on the day trip, then they come to the distillery, where they get a tour of our factory then do a tasting in our swim-up pool bar. Lastly, they finish the tour with a sunset cruise back to Boracay.
For Manila, we plan to open tours once the pandemic finishes. We have a beautiful tasting room in Ugat, where we have our library of flavours, which has been created using advanced laboratory distillation equipment. The technique lowers the ethanol boiling point to room temperature and helps us preserve delicate flavours.
People can try them and get educated on rare local ingredients we have found around the country on our travels. We can also create custom small-batch spirits for individuals and businesses.
IR: What are your plans for the business for the next 12-18 months?
TB: We are just getting started and have big plans for growth. We love Boracay so we have our main factory down there already. Next we hope to do another distillery down in Siargao island. It’s so beautiful down there and the vibe is amazing. We want to attach it to a resort and put another [cocktail bar] there. We are toying with the idea of another Agimat in Bonifacio Global City and I’m seeing some amazing pictures of Palawan so who knows. At the moment, we need to focus on ramping up Ube Cream Liqueur production to meet local and export demand.